Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Given that IDF service is mandatory for everyone except the haredim, asking an Israeli about their opinion on the IDF is literally "do you like yourself and your neighbors?" - not terribly meaningful, or a useful reflection of Israeli opinion on state policy.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil.
As I understand it, the original conception for Oct. 7 was a surprise Hamas break-out, coupled with a simultaneous large-scale Hezbollah offensive, would pincer Israel and overwhelm its local defenses, potentially sufficiently to spark sympathetic uprisings in the West Bank or among Israeli arabs as well.
Notably, the Hezbollah component of the attack didn't happen, and good for the Israelis that it didn't because in terms of raw numbers of fighters and weapons, Hezbollah had a lot more than Hamas (prior to Operation Grim Beeper and collateral airstrikes, at least).
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.
Except that's a meaningful statement - "the acts of war undertaken so far have been insufficient to compel a favorable political resolution" - just glibly phrased.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
If you are the Israeli government, then yes, the lives of your citizens are more important than the lives of an adversary. That's what it means to be a nation-state.
Same for the US. I would expect the American government to prioritize the lives of Americans held abroad above the lives of citizens of enemy - or even of third party neutral - countries.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Even "pariah states" have friends somewhere; e.g. North Korea and the PRC.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Except there was a really loud leftist/arab group celebrating Oct. 7 basically immediately. There were "Al Aqsa Flood"/pro-Palestinian parades/celebratory demonstrations in several US cities in early October, 2024, and lots of random hang-glider imagery.
Huh! Interesting. What about a siege of a medieval city - not a fortress with just a military garrison, but an actual significant permanent settlement, probably including nearby farmers, villagers, etc who fled for the "safety" of the town when the attackers showed up - when the attacking army encircles the city and doesn't allow anyone or anything in or out?
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Does Israel actually want to be the ones distributing aid?
Yes, because they can prevent it from being directly hijacked by Hamas. (What hamas fighters do to Palestinians who take food to homes outside of Israeli-controlled safe zones is different, but that's a lot less efficient for Hamas than just seizing/being handed the aid while it's still loaded on the trucks as the UN was doing).
It was my impression that they kind of like the current situation, where Gaza mostly starves but it's not their fault directly
No, because that way Hamas controlled the aid and could continue to starve the population while keeping all the goodies for themselves to enable further armed resistance/rebuilding after the ultimate end of the war - and it will end, because the IDF doesn't have the full-time soldiery to keep up this occupation without calling up large numbers of reservists and disrupting the civilian economy.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
At the exact same time Israel declared independence, an ethnic cleansing/population exchange a literal order of magnitude larger was already going on in another part of the same empire.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Israel is a small state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
They have dug the world's largest tunnel network to shelter military personnel, deliberately intermingled it with the civilian population and vital civilian infrastructure, and denied those civilians the ability to shelter in it. They are trying to get their people killed.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
War crimes are only crimes insofar as both sides can agree to - and actually do - abide by particular rules of warfare, either customary or explicit by treaty. Insofar as one party either verbally refuses to or actually breaches those rules, they lose the protection of the rules and are subject to the whim of whatever the opposing party wants to do them (and can actually do/get away with doing).
Even the Red Cross accepts the concept of reprisal as a means of forcing non-conforming belligerents to shape up and fly right.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
No, because the Western-left position is oikophobic, and Israel is coded western and white because they're rich, technologically advanced, and don't play the noble savage or starving charity case. Also, there are a lot of thoroughly-assimilated western jews who in actuality have about as much to do with west bank settlers as boston unitarians have with Egyptian copts, but who fill in the western mind when they think of "jew." Also, the left has been hijacked by opportunistic arab/islamic in-group pandering.
As a result, the left is going to be anti-zionist until Israel either disappears or creates a desert and calls it peace.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I think it is entirely reasonable to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas. If I held the Israel government only to the standard of Hamas (whom I consider murderous thugs who need to be wiped from the face of the earth), then I would have to concede that it would be a good thing if NATO invaded Israel and occupied them for a few decades until they learned better.
No offense, but this is insane moon-logic to me, and I need help grokking it. It's completely alien to the traditional logic of international law - “it is impossible to visualize the conduct of hostilities in which one side would be bound by rules of warfare without benefitting from them, and the other side would benefit from rules of warfare without being bound by them.” (H. Lauterpacht, “The Limits of Operation of the Law of War” (1953) 30 British Year Book of Int’l Law 206, 212).
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
You don’t want a non-masculine mid to ever be professing “fascism” in public.
And yet, Goebbels.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
No, the major ones in the public imagination (Spain, Italy, Germany) were as much or more in reaction to powerful, organized, and street-level-thuggish communist parties in their countries than they were a backlash against old aristocracy. In fact, a major reason the fascists beat the communists was that the old aristocracy lined up behind the fascists, on the theory that anything was better than getting expropriated and lined up against a wall by bolsheviks.
Is there an example of a near-fascist state with significant ethnic diversity that's succeeded ?
Depends on what you mean by "succeeded", but Getulio Vargas in Brazil comes to mind as a potential example here. And Salazar in Portugal wasn't ultimately successful - his regime didn't outlive him - but lusotropicalism was the opposite of ethnically-exclusive; Salazar envisaged Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Timor, etc. as integral parts of Portugal itself.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Except that Cal Code of Civil Procedure 116.530 clearly states that attorneys can only appear in small claims court unless (1) they are party to the claim themselves in a personal capacity, (2) they're a member of a partnership whose members are all attorneys, or (3) they are an officer or director of a professional corporation whose officers/directors are all attorneys.
And section 116.540 specifies the form in which a corporation or other business association shall appear, which is "only through a regular employee, or a duly appointed or elected officer or director, who is employed, appointed, or elected for purposes other than solely representing the corporation in small claims court."
Small claims court is different.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
things like small claims court where a company sending a lawyer to show up and handle things would be more expensive than just giving the person suing you some money to drop the case.
I don't know about where you are, but in CA the whole point of small claims court is that a lawyer can't represent someone; it's fully in pro per by requirement.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
I mean, yes, compared to the utterly defanged western europeans the Ukranians are fearsome. But I thought that the main lesson of this war has been Russia's incompetence and that their military production/procurement seems to be corrupt as hell and mostly faking their "advanced" capabilities.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
...No? That's literally the opposite of what I said. "Use value" assumes some objective, rational value of "use"; exchange value includes all the irrational feelings and opinions people can have about goods and services like risk aversion, FOMO, status, or just idiosyncratic preference. People also make secondary bets on what other people will find useful/interesting/worth buying, introducing further fuzziness into the system.
That's not commodity fetishism; it's the opposite. Recognizing that when people are buying things, they're not just buying things - they're communicating with other people as well.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
The US Army is so far behind we're bragging about just being able to drop grenades from drones
Why assume the public-facing releases are actually the state of the force?
And yet Germany was starved into submission in WWI, Japan bombed into submission in WWII, Tigray starved/bombed into submission in Ethiopia, etc.
Yes, it is a truism that war is politics by other means.
Your strawmanning aside, that's a nice hunch you have there - a shame if someone were to...test it.
Blind assertion without evidence. It's quite clear that murdering Jewish civilians is envisaged as an instrumental stepping stone to "liberating" Israeli territory for Palestinians - Hamas and other Palestinian organizations openly say so. And it's not as if there is any shortage of Israeli press squabbling about the blockade, food aid issues, and what the ultimate political program that Israel should be pursuing w/r/t Gaza is (downstream of "10/7 can never happen again" of course), none of which you discuss or cite.
More options
Context Copy link